I watched Alice and Lucy daintily pick their way through the moist grass after Sally, who had gathered up her long skirts. Henry was happily spraying every tree, and accidentally sprinkled the boots of a Hell’s Angel too stoned to notice. Already the counterculture was a revelation beyond all their childhood dreams.

Lykiard showed me his timetable and the ramp of wooden planks that led to the upper of the two stages. I gazed uneagerly at the tower of steel scaffolding.

“Is this thing going to hold together? If one bolt snaps we’ll all be launched into orbit.”

“I think that’s the idea. It may be our only chance. Let’s face it, middle-aged America has hijacked the Apollo programme. Men older than your bank manager will land on the moon.”

“But is it going up or down?” Trying to steady my nerves, I bought a whisky at the bar, then found that the plastic cup contained nothing but a brown stain.

“It isn’t dirty,” Lykiard explained. “That’s your measure of whisky. Smoke pot, but don’t buy any here. You’ll find capitalist exploitation at its most ruthless.” He pointed to the seats in the VIP enclosure below the stage. “Despite appearances, the old class structures survive intact. The best seats are reserved for the pop aristocracy—promoters, record company executives, TV people, and the music press. Behind them we get the pop world’s middle class, all those well-brought-up girls from the suburbs who just come for the day. But down at the bottom, as ever, is the proletariat of the drug culture…”

Strolling through the fringes of the crowd, we reached a wide ditch that marked the edge of the field rented from a local farmer. Groups of shabby young men and a few sallow girls were camping in the ditch. Most of them had spent the night there, sleeping among the tree roots in makeshift tents of tarpaulin. Smoking their joints, they were cooking on small stoves from which a sweet pine smoke rose into the air. They reminded me of the Chinese peasants I had seen clinging to life in the irrigation ditches of wartime Shanghai. One of them offered me a skillet of gruel. I squatted under the tarpaulin and ate the spicy oatmeal, sharing the plastic cup of wine I had taken from the picnic hamper.